AuthorTopic: Hastings? (Read 3606 times)

I understand Hastings is a great school, has excellent placement, is highly respected, and provides top-notch legal education. I know its reputation far exceeds its ranking, but the bottom line is the school used to be ranked 20, and now it sits tied with some others for 43 in US News.

Now I wouldn't take too much stock in the USNews rankings, but they do exist. Does anybody know what accounted for the schools decline?

Yeah, I'm not exactly sure what happened. They either refused to send certain information or they forgot to. Another thing that I think is hurting them is that they never really had a great library. A new one is under construction and several buildings have been remodeled. I think that they are definately a great school and that US News needs to be taken with a several spoonfuls of salt.

They faculty declined is the reason they went down. Most law schools used to have mandatory retirement ages, and when a big name hit the mandatory retirement age of 70 at school x, Hastings used to offer them a spot on their faculty, some jsut retired, some accepted the offer, but Hastings was able to build a quasi top 10 faculty that way, when schools did away with mandatory retirement ages, Hastings was in a bad position, one cause it became infinitely harder to hire big name faculty for a school like themselves, secondly because they probably hadn't developed their own faculty for years, like a baseball team that doesn't upkeep its farm system and only signs free agents, if free agency were ever done away with they would be in trouble. That is the primary reason for their fall. Then later they refused to report information to USNEWS and that hurt them, but the decline of their faculty was the key--I heard this all from another poster on this board a couple years or maybe last year, you might be able to find the thread.

They faculty declined is the reason they went down. Most law schools used to have mandatory retirement ages, and when a big name hit the mandatory retirement age of 70 at school x, Hastings used to offer them a spot on their faculty, some jsut retired, some accepted the offer, but Hastings was able to build a quasi top 10 faculty that way, when schools did away with mandatory retirement ages, Hastings was in a bad position, one cause it became infinitely harder to hire big name faculty for a school like themselves, secondly because they probably hadn't developed their own faculty for years, like a baseball team that doesn't upkeep its farm system and only signs free agents, if free agency were ever done away with they would be in trouble. That is the primary reason for their fall. Then later they refused to report information to USNEWS and that hurt them, but the decline of their faculty was the key--I heard this all from another poster on this board a couple years or maybe last year, you might be able to find the thread.

Im sorry you're an idiot. What USNWR category takes into account faculty, besides student:faculty ratio? You could have the ten best teachers in the world instructing your students and USNWR wouldnt give a *&^%.

Dude I am hope your joking the peer assessment score is almost based solely on faculty. That methodology for that score is based solely on each dean of a law school and its five newest faculty members filling out the survey, that is based 90% on faculty. Also to a lesser extent employer assessment is based on faculty, though the studies from the legal blogs tend to show that is more correlated to student LSAT. But peer assessment is based almost solely on faculty quality. US News tries to divide it, is a law school to be judged by the students it produces or the academic scholarship it contributes, its pretty much acknowledge that when profs rank schools its done solely on what they think of the others school faculty (or if they aren't familiar with the school's faculty, the general reputation of the school's faculty in academia which is based the general reputation of the school's faculty. Read Brain Leiter, hes an example of how profs think, sometimes he talks about student quality, but his most passionate rankings are definitely the ones that rank faculty.